ABSTRACT
Philosophers and psychologists have offered many definitions of creativity, and many explanations (Krausz et al. 2009; Gaut 2010). The core notion, however, is that creativity is the capacity to generate ideas or artifacts that are both new and positively valuable. “Valuable” can mean many different things. For instance, a drama or a novel may
be valuable because it throws light on human nature and/or experience. A painting may be valuable because it is beautiful and/or implicitly condemns an act of war. An art installation may be valuable because it makes us think. A biochemical discovery may be valuable because it cures disease, and an invention because it is useful. Moreover, an idea or artifact can be valuable in several ways simultaneously. In the context of the arts, a large part of what is meant is that the new structure is
aesthetically valuable. It follows that one’s theory of aesthetics will affect one’s criteria of creativity. Even if a philosopher discussing “beauty” (or any other aesthetic concept, such as harmony, elegance, sublimity, expression, communication of emotion, etc.) never mentions creativity, judgments about it will be tacitly implied. For this reason creativity is an appropriate topic for a handbook of aesthetics, not just for handbooks of psychology or art history. Intentionalist philosophers in general would agree. But formalist and structuralist
critics deny this (Gaut and Livingston 2003). They argue that psychological facts about the author are irrelevant to the artwork itself. However, their writings stress the audience’s reaction, which (they say) is to recognize the creativity shown in the artwork or to respond to it in a creative way themselves. Even on their account, creativity cannot be ignored. We take it for granted that art is a Good Thing. Plato did not. He thought it fri-
volous at best and dangerous at worst (Plato 1961). He saw the arts as irrational: instead of leading people to the truth, they aim to excite emotion – which is not even directed at “real” people or events. Although they sometimes depict worthy role models, they often encourage unethical behavior. A work of art is valuable if it orients its audience toward the Forms. But since only metaphysics can lead us to them, only that is intrinsically worthwhile. So aesthetics, considered as the study or justification of the intrinsic value of art, is either trivial or impossible. As for artistic creativity, Plato famously attributed this to divine inspiration: “a poet
is holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside
himself and reason is no longer in him … for not by art [i.e. skill] does he utter these, but by power divine” (Ion 534a-b). If that’s so, then a naturalistic (scientific) explanation of creativity is impossible. Many since have made similar claims, attributing the artist’s inspiration not to the
Muses but to some other supernatural force. Faced with an extraordinary talent such as Mozart’s, people today often imply that he was literally superhuman. This “inspirational” theory even appeared in The Times, when the critic Bernard Levin commented on the play Amadeus. Comparing the conscientiously competent Salieri with his socially undisciplined contemporary Mozart, Levin said – and clearly meant it – that Mozart was divinely inspired. Divine creativity is a philosophical mystery. The medieval theologians spent a
great deal of time discussing God’s creation of the material world. The core problem was that God was supposed to be immaterial. How, then, could he create something material – in other words, something utterly novel? Some said that he created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo). Others argued that this was impossible, sometimes inferring that the creator of nature somehow shares nature’s properties. But with no essential distinction between creator and created, can we really speak of “creation” at all? In short, the concept seemed intractable. Aesthetics faces similar puzzles. For that theological problem is a special case of a
paradox that faces aestheticians and psychologists too. How can truly creative, truly novel, ideas possibly arise? Any adequate account of creativity must address that question – which appears to be beyond the reach of science. (Karl Popper, for instance, argued that the “context of discovery” is not only irrelevant to the philosophy of science but also an insuperable stumbling block to a scientific psychology – Popper 1965.) Immanuel Kant saw the theological version of the question as unanswerable, being
one of the four metaphysical “antinomies.” Where human creativity was concerned, he focused on the value, not the novelty. In his Critique of Judgment (1987), he argued that beauty is the core aesthetic value and artistic creativity is the ability to produce beautiful things. This is not a strictly rational activity, nor (pace Plato) is it wholly spontaneous and undisciplined either. For Kant, judgments of beauty are disinterested and in a sense universal. In other
words, to say that this object is beautiful “to me,” as one might say that the taste of this cheese is pleasant “to me,” is “laughable” (ibid.: §7). Although in fact people disagree about which things are beautiful, Kant argued that disinterested contemplation would eventually lead to agreement and therefore that it is sensible to try to persuade someone that they should find an artwork beautiful. (By contrast, one would not say that someone should like a particular cheese – although one might urge them to try it again, hoping that they will acquire a taste for it.) But that is not to say that anyone can be forced, on pain of contradiction, to accept a given aesthetic judgment. In general, the appreciation of beauty involves a mentally harmonious recognition of formal harmony in the object (spatial in the visual arts, temporal in music). Nature, for Kant, held a special place in aesthetics: “nature is beautiful because it
looks like art, and art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as art while yet it looks like nature” (ibid.: §45). This remark is most readily applied to the representational paintings and sculptures that were the accepted Western styles
when Kant wrote. Applying it to, for example, Islamic decorative art or to abstract art is more problematic. An abstract canvas or sculpture may, in some sense, look like nature. But to apply Kantian aesthetics across the board would require that one see all examples of formal harmony, all examples of beauty, as reminiscent of nature. In addition, it would involve decisions about whether the paintings of Piet
Mondrian or Jackson Pollock, the objets trouvés of Marcel Duchamp or the conceptual art of Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst, show the type of beauty or formal harmony posited by Kant. If they do not, then on his view they are not genuinely beautiful and are not really art. Of course, there have been many redefinitions – and repudiations – of the concept of
art since Kant’s time. For example, both John Ruskin and R. G. Collingwood offered highly influential accounts (directed on Nature and emotional expression respectively), which imply that certain types of modern art are highly problematic in aesthetic terms (Boden and Edmonds 2010; Boden forthcoming a, b). (These disputes are further complicated by twentieth-century changes in the financial marketing and social contexts of art.) What is relevant here is that if one defines creativity in terms of some specific theory of aesthetics – in other words, if one insists that the “positive value” mentioned in the definition above is this one or that one – then objects regarded by some people as creative works of art will not be classified as creative, never mind as art. Kantian aesthetics did not explain why we so often find craftwork beautiful. Or
rather, it seemed to imply that we never do find it genuinely beautiful. Craftspeople, he said, simply follow rules, whereas artists, even though they may follow rules, add spontaneity (freedom, unpredictability), which is essential for beauty (ibid.: §§43-46). It would seem to follow that the pleasure felt in considering craftwork has more of what he called “sensibility” than of “understanding” or aesthetic “contemplation.” Besides offering a philosophical basis for seeing fine art as entirely distinct from
the crafts, Kant gave an account of artistic “genius” that influenced the Romantics. They promulgated the myth of the Romantic genius, someone – a member of a tiny elite – blessed with some extraordinary and inexplicable faculty of creativity. And, like Plato, they stressed the “irrational” aspects of creativity. So whereas Kant himself had pointed out that even genius requires effort and training and that creative imagination must sometimes yield to disciplined judgment (ibid.: §§47-50), the moral popularly drawn from Romanticism was that effort, training and disciplined judgment have little or nothing to do with creativity. This is a myth in three senses: it is still very widely believed, it is often used to
excuse behavior that would otherwise be unacceptable and it is almost certainly false. There is no good psychological or neuroscientific evidence that some humans are endowed with a special faculty denied to the rest of us (Boden 2004: ch. 10). On the contrary, creativity appears to be based in everyday cognitive abilities: memory, perception, recognition, attention, noticing, reminding, comparing and so on (Perkins 1981). At most, some individuals – such as Mozart – may have been born with a more efficient version of an ability we all share. (The explanation for this might at base be very boring: for instance, increased storage capacity for short-term memory or higher speed of neuronal communication.) One should not forget, however, that even the child prodigy Mozart (like other
renowned composers) had to devote himself relentlessly to music for twelve years
before composing anything musically interesting, as opposed to precociously competent (Kunkel 1985). The reason for this is that it takes many years and much repetitive effort to learn the dimensions of an interestingly complex style of thinking or conceptual space. It also takes many years to discover what types of structure (e.g. what types of music) the space will and will not allow – and, crucially, to develop a sense of where the limits of the space can be most fruitfully pushed or altered so that the entire space is transformed. As a result of this learning process, the cognitive structures and processes in the person’s head will naturally differ from Everyman’s. Nevertheless, the difference between creative geniuses and the rest of us probably has more to do with motivation than with inborn cognition. That last claim is supported by Howard Gardner’s (1993) study of the driven
personalities of seven twentieth-century creators drawn from various fields, including painting, poetry, music and dance. Gardner suggests that they share a general profile of motivation and morals. The “exemplary creator” comes from a family that is outside the centers of social power and influence and values education, without necessarily being educated. But it is soon outgrown and the young person finds a group of peers (often in a city) who share the same interests. This social support is crucial, especially when the creator (typically after many years of committed apprenticeship) comes up with an idea so different from those currently valued that it is not easily understood, still less accepted. Self-confidence, stubbornness and exceptionally hard work are then needed, to
persevere with and to polish the new insight. Energy and commitment are essential and the creator expects very high standards of himself or herself and others. But these apply to the creative work: they do not normally include high moral standards. Egotism, selfishness and ruthless exploitation of others are common. Gardner (1994: 150) speaks of “a legacy of destruction and tragedy” attending the friends and family of the creative person. Seven case studies, admittedly, is not very many. However, there is a large body of
psychometric evidence drawn from studies covering thousands of individuals to support Gardner’s general conclusions (Sternberg 1999: chs 2-4). Reviewing this evidence, Hans Eysenck (1994) has shown that creativity is linked with a common cognitive style called “psychoticism,” which includes psychotics at one extreme of the scale. Psychoticism is defined as a general tendency to widen or overgeneralize conceptual categories. It is not surprising to find it statistically associated with creative thinking, since creative ideas often involve an unusual analogy or a combination of dissimilar concepts. What may be more surprising is that this tendency can be encouraged or inhibited by specific psychotropic drugs and that explanations in terms of basic neuronal functions can suggest why this should be so. (Explanations of creativity couched in terms of psychoticism are very different from the psychodynamic explanations offered in Freud 1963.) The relevance of this to Gardner’s work is that cognitive overinclusiveness
(psychoticism) is associated with particular personality traits. To give the good news first, it correlates highly with being imaginative, unconventional, rebellious, individualistic, independent, autonomous, flexible and intuitive. The bad news is that it also correlates strongly with being conceited, cynical, disorderly, egotistical, hostile, outspoken, uninhibited, quarrelsome, aggressive, asocial and – in some cases – psychopathic.
